Mobility as a service: a new model for sustainable mobility in tourism

Abstract

Purpose

Developing sustainable mobility can add value to the travel and tourism experience in alpine areas and can become a challenge for destinations in terms of interests, goals, skills and values involving both public and private subjects. Mobility as a Service (MaaS) is a new model for delivering sustainable transport services that in recent experiences seem to be an alternative to the use of owned cars by allowing the personalized use of a bundle of public and private transport means. This paper aims to identify the positive aspects in the two main Alpine regions affected by tourism demand coming mainly from Lombardy by implementing a mobility model inspired by Maas in the Lombardy capital.

Design/methodology/approach

The tourism demand of the Autonomous Province of Trento and the Aosta Valley Region is thus analyzed using descriptive statistics on tourist flows and mobility characteristics.

Findings

Technology and propensity to change are the determining factors to move from traditional to innovative mobility systems.

Originality/value

This work, by considering the recent studies on MaaS models, limited to sustainable urban mobility models, extends the MaaS approach to the key concepts of “sustainable mobility” and “sustainable tourism” by analyzing the tourist flow, which from Lombardy invest the main alpine regions.

Citation

Signorile, P., Larosa, V. and Spiru, A. (2018), "Mobility as a service: a new model for sustainable mobility in tourism", Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes, Vol. 10 No. 2, pp. 185-200. https://doi.org/10.1108/WHATT-12-2017-0083